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Saturday, April 1, 2017

“April Fool,” by Mary Steer

April showers bring May flowers, April showers
bring May flowers, thought Melissa as she bent her head into the
rain and strode up the street towards her favourite café. But May
is a long way off and meanwhile we have these frickin’ showers to put up with.

A penetrating cold went along with the driving rain, and both
seemed to suit Melissa’s mood today. It had been a month to the day since she’d
finally given Wendell the push, but just because she’d broken up with him didn’t
mean she couldn’t mind about it. He’d moved on but that was only because he had
someone else in place, ready to go.

Melissa ducked into the café,
feeling as gloomy as the lowering storm clouds outside. She ordered the tuna
melt this time, and a chocolate milk. She set off with her food towards her
usual table but before she could get to it, a tall man in a dark brown raincoat
hurried over and set his tray down, almost underneath hers. Irritated, she
turned away, scanning the room for another spot.

“I’m sorry,” said the man
in the raincoat, and then added, “Do join me, won’t you,
Melissa?”

Melissa did a double-take. Did she know
this guy? He didn’t look familiar at all. Maybe someone she’d met at some
party or other? She gave him a tight-lipped smile, just in case she did know
him, and turned away, saying, “That’s all right,
thanks. I have a book.”

“Not A.J.P. Taylor’s The
First World War: An Illustrated History, for your History 201 course?” said
the stranger. Melissa looked at him again and yes, he definitely was a
stranger. How did he know about her History 201 course? The book wasn’t even in
view; she had it tucked in her purse.

“No,” she said, and began
to walk away with more determination than she felt—wondering if instead she
should stay and ask this bold weirdo how the hell he knew her name and about
her history course. The man in the raincoat rose from the table—her table!—picked
up his tray, and followed her. She turned briskly around.

“Do you not want that
table?” she asked. “Because I do, if you don’t.”
She emphasized the last word.

“You usually sit there, I
know,” said the man, standing in front of Melissa. “You like to
sit there because you can have your back to the wall and watch for your
ex-boyfriend and his new girlfriend. And there’s this nice convenient fake
plant to screen you if they do come in.”

“Excuse me, but how the
hell do you know all this stuff about me?” Melissa
demanded.

“I have a dossier on you,”
the man replied.

“What?!” Melissa didn’t
know whether to be angry, or frightened, or both. “Are you–what
are you? Are you, like, from the Dean’s office? Or, or CSIS or something? I
didn’t do anything. Did I? Why would anyone want a dossier on me?”

“Look,” said Melissa,
trying to sound sterner and more in control than she felt, “if
you’re not going to tell me what this is all about, will you please just leave
me alone so I can eat my lunch in peace?”

“Ah, but it won’t be a
peaceful lunch anymore, will it, Melissa?” said the man. “Because even
if I leave you alone, now you’ll be wondering about it all, won’t you?”

Enraged by this whole crazy situation as
she was—and,
if she let herself admit it, a bit scared and creeped-out too—Melissa privately
agreed. Walking away now would give her no peace. She gave a short, sharp sigh.

“Okay,” she said,
dragging out the “o” and the “a” to let the
man know how strange she found the whole situation. “But, as you
so astutely observed, I sit with my back to the wall.”

His face lit up as she set down her tray
and he quickly
moved to sit down opposite her. “I’m so glad you’re
staying,” he said, and he did, indeed, seem delighted. “So you’re
having the tuna melt? It’s good, but I like the veggie wrap best. That’s what I’m
having.”

Freakier and freakier, thought Melissa.
Out loud she said, “Okay, about this
dossier. Why do you have it and who are you, anyway? Should I know you somehow?
What’s your name?”

The man either had not heard, or was
choosing to ignore her questions. “I also prefer chocolate
milk, but I chose white because it’s better for you. They say you should take
on something for Lent, as well as give up something. I gave up alcohol but I
took on eating healthy. Are you doing anything for Lent, Melissa?”

It flitted through her head to say, “Yes,
I gave up eating lunch with bizarre strangers, but clearly that’s not working
out for me today.” Instead she chose to try to drag him back to the topic at
hand by asking, “Isn’t that in your little
dossier about me?”

He took the bait with surprising swiftness.
“It’s not a little
dossier,”
he said, and for a moment, he looked as annoyed as she felt. He recovered
quickly, though, and, smiling again, said, “Go on—ask me
something about you.”

Melissa blinked. This was like some sort of
first date from hell, or from some alternate reality where all the rules were
changed and instead of talking about herself, she had to invite this loony to talk
about her, for her. She stared at him for a moment, and in the pause she heard
the rain slamming against the café window in a gust of
wind.

“Stop!” Melissa
cried. This was ridiculous! Some of the answers were wrong but she now knew
where this man had got this amalgam of information. The childhood dream was
painfully right, and how it stung, to be betrayed in this way.

“How do you know Wendell?”
she asked, the fury and confusion in her piling up on one another until she
thought she would explode. The stranger was just sitting there, watching her
uneasily now. “WHAT ELSE HAS WENDELL TOLD YOU?” she shouted, half
rising from her seat, her voice drowning out the sound of the rain on the window
and the murmur of surrounding conversations. Other diners in the café glanced
over and then became studiously interested in their own meals.

“Who’s Wendell?”
said the man, belatedly.

“How dare you,” Melissa
said, her voice back to a whisper. She was glaring at him as she sat down
again. The man shifted in his seat and would not look at her. “You
can’t pretend to know everything about me and then also pretend you don’t know
who Wendell is. You even mentioned him. You said I sit here so I can see if he comes
in with his new girlfriend and I can hide from them behind this fake plant. You
know a lot less about me than you think, if this famous dossier of yours was
compiled with Wendell’s help. I lied to Wendell because I was so sick of his
questions, as if knowing my favourite colour was a doorway into who I really
am. Did he tell you my favourite food?”

The man scuffled his feet under the table. “Shrimp,”
he said.

“Wrong,” said Melissa. “Did
he tell you my favourite flower?”

“Roses,” said the
man, glancing at her almost furtively before looking down again.

“Wrong,” she said. “Did
he tell you—”

“But why did you lie?” the
man interrupted. “He was your boyfriend, he loved you! Why did you
lie to him?”

“Because I didn’t love
him,” said Melissa—too smoothly, she realized, so added, “anymore.
Because I knew he didn’t love me anymore either. Because I thought it would be
funny to see him try to find fifteen orange roses for me for Valentine’s Day to
prove he still cared, even though I knew he would also be finding a dozen roses
for her as well at that point. Valentine’s Day also not my favourite day of the
year, by the way.”

“But, why?” the man asked
again. He seemed wounded.

“Why do you care?”
snarled Melissa. “Who the hell
are you, anyway? To want to know so much about me? You tell me something about
you, how about.”

He looked defeated. “I’m Hank,”
he said.

“Like that’s supposed to
tell me anything,” Melissa retorted. She had finally gained something in this
shifting situation and if she could hold onto it with scorn, she would.

“Oh, Hank,”
said Melissa, as comprehension dawned. “The obsessive
cousin? The one with OCD?”

“I’m not that bad,” said
Hank, and he smiled. “But I do prefer to call
it CDO. Keep the letters alphabetical. It’s a joke,” he added.

Melissa was staring at him.

“Okay,” she said, “but
that still doesn’t explain why you’d want to keep a dossier on me.”

Hank looked down at his hands where
they lay folded in his lap. “Wendell always talked
about you so much when he was home, and I saw a picture of you, and then when
you guys broke up, well, I thought maybe....” He trailed off.

“You want to go out with
me?” Melissa was astonished. “You came all the way
from Antigonish to try to go out with me by freaking me out?”

“I thought you’d be
impressed by how much I knew,” said Hank. “I thought it
would be intriguing and mysterious and draw you in.”

Now Melissa was looking at him in a considering
way, and suddenly she said, almost to herself, “Why not?”

“What?” said Hank. “What
did you say?”

“Let’s do it,” said
Melissa. “Why not? But we’d have to take it slow,” she
warned. “You already know so much about me, but I hardly
know a thing about you.”

“But that’s not true,” Hank
objected. “You told me you lied to Wendell. So I have just
as much to find out about you.”

“Well, then,” said
Melissa, “here we are, having lunch on our first date.
What do you want to know?”

Hank lit up again. “Was it really
your childhood dream to catch a unicorn?” he asked.

“No,” said Melissa. “I’d
actually always wanted to catch a troll. You know—like under the bridge in
Three Billy Goats Gruff? I had a troll trap, and I was going to use unicorn
meat for bait. And my favourite day of the year is actually April Fool’s Day.”

“But that’s today,” Hank said.

“That’s right.”

“So are you fooling, or telling the truth?”

“You’re the expert. You
tell me,” Melissa said. She took the first bite of her tuna melt, and glanced
out the window as she chewed. There was no sign of Wendell with his new floozy,
and it was still raining hard.

Mary Steer’s fiction has short-listed or placed in various contests including the
John Kenneth Galbraith Literary Award, the Brilliant Flash Fiction Springtime
Writing Contest, and the Elora Writers’ Festival short story contest. Her work
has appeared in publications in Canada, the USA, the UK and Ireland. She is
working on a novel, but is constantly being seduced by the siren call of flash
fiction and short stories. Links to her published work may be found at her
website:www.marysteer.comMary is on Twitter as @marysteerwriter and on Facebook here.

Brian Henry has been a book editor, writer, and creative writing instructor for more than 25 years. He teaches creative writing at Ryerson University. He also leads weekly creative writing courses in Burlington, Mississauga, Oakville and Georgetown and conducts Saturday workshops throughout Ontario. His proudest boast is that he has helped many of his students get published.